#spaceweekend №2 — Extraterrestrial Messages
#spaceweekend is the weekly rubric in our twitter, this time it was a short overview of messages sent to space by humans
As early as the 19th century, inventors imagined “sky telegraph” to communicate with the supposed inhabitants of the solar system’s planets.
1820 — Gauss was suggesting use of his heliotrope to reflect sunlight to other planets communicating in this way http://buff.ly/1p6frX9
1901 — Nikola Tesla reported receiving a strange signal, possibly from Mars, on his giant transmitting tower in Colorado Springs.
As late as the 1920s, many people (including Albert Einstein) still considered visual-based communication more practical.
Now radio is generally assumed as more suitable means of ET communication, but it wasn’t until 1959 that it started to be taken seriously.
1962 — the first radio broadcast for extraterrestrial civilizations in the history of mankind happened in Evpatoria, USSR. It was directed to Venus and transmitted in Morse code words: “MIR, LENIN, SSSR” (PEACE, LENIN, USSR)
1972 and 1973 — a pair of gold-anodized aluminium plaques were placed on board the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts.
The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts were the first human-built objects to achieve escape velocity from the Solar System.
Schematic diagram on plaque shows trajectory of spacecraft past Jupiter and out of the Solar System.
And here is its redesign by Edward Tufte including some magic in it!
As for Arecibo message sent 16/11/1974 it will take 25,000 years to reach its intended destination — globular star cluster M13.
The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977.
The Voyager 1 and 2 probes are currently the farthest human made objects from Earth and the first to enter interstellar space.
You can find all their content on various dedicated websites, for example: http://goldenrecord.org/ Included entries were supposed to represent diversity of life on Earth, as this picture 54:
1999 — Cosmic Call from Yevpatoria Radar became the second specially designed radio message for extraterrestrials. It included Interstellar Rosetta Stone to decode it and around 50 000 messages from people of Earth.
Aug–Sept 2001 — Teen Age Message (TAM) interstellar radio transmissions sent from the Yevpatoria Planetary Radar again designed by a group of young terrestrials.
TAM included The First Theremin Concert for Extraterrestrials — world’s first musical Active SETI broadcast! It should have sounded similar to this theremin record by the same performer Lydia Kavina
2008 — A Message from Earth: digital time capsule with 501 messages selected through a competition on the social networking site Bebo.
On its 50th anniversary 4 February 2008 NASA transmitted “Across the Universe” by The Beatles in the direction of the star Polaris.
2005 — the first website beamed into space by Deep Space Communications Network…craigslist.org
2008 — first advertisement transmitted to outer space by radars in the Arctic circle — Doritos
Now you can also become the part of ET communication history as http://oneearthmessage.org/ will open submissions next year (2015)!
BONUS for those who have read that far: the weirdest alien communication ever, just two words: POETICA VAGINAL… read more— http://timeblimp.com/?page_id=1989
